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Tuesday, May 6, 2014

Rewordify

I just learned about Rewordify this morning from Richard
Byrne on Twitter @rmbyrne. In the article
“By
Request – Five Apps and Sites to Help Students Develop Reading Comprehension
Skills” on the blog Technology for Teachers for Teachers, Byrne describes
Rewordify, a free site developed by a special education teacher and former
computer programmer.The site allows you
to copy and paste or type a complicated passage into a box, then it rephrases
it.Words that are replaced are
highlighted in yellow.This could be a
great resource for students who need rephrasing, or for students who are
struggling with a difficult section of text.

Notability

Notability is a great app that was just listed as the iTunes
app of the week. One of the great
features of the Notability app, besides the ability to create and manage your
own notes, is that you can use the Notability app to annotate PDFs. For the classroom teacher dealing with a lot
of reports or for students who are working with different PDF file articles or
even handouts, this could be a great tool for highlighting, making notes or providing
responses.

With Notability you can then email your notes and annotated
PDFs or save them in your Google Drive or Dropbox. Here at school a great option would be to
have students send their work to you using WebDAV. Don’t know what WebDAV is? WebDav is a way in
which a person can access and save to a shared folder. Stop by and see me and I can help you out
with that or setting up a generic classroom Google Drive.

See the basics of using Notability below:

Learn how to pull a PDF into Notability, Annotate and Save.

Understanding Science: How Science
Really Works

In last Thursday night’s #NGSSchat on Twitter, a science
teacher shared out a link to the Understanding Science Webpage. This is a great resource as we transition
into the NGSS. On the Teacher Resources page,
you can find many exceptional links including: Teacher Lounges by grade level,
a Guide to Understanding Science, Teaching Tools, a Resource Database, Image
Library, information about misconceptions and research. On the Teaching Tools page, you can find PDF
versions of checklists, flowcharts per grade level and a toolkit. On the Teacher Resources page, you can limit
the results by grade level and discover new ideas for science related lessons
and activities you might want to try out.

#NGSSchat happens every Thursday from 9-10 pm EST on
Twitter, check it out if you have time! There is always great discussion and plenty of
resources!